Omar Amanat

On the morning of September 11, 2001, entrepreneur Omar Amanat was supposed to be at the top of the World Trade Center. A friend, Scott Saber, was giving a speech at the famed restaurant Windows on the World. The WTC was also headquarters to Tradescape Corp., the online brokerage company Mr. Amanat had founded in the course of a business career that led Fortune Magazine to proclaim him one of the “Top Ten Most Influential Technologists” in the country.

At 8:30AM on his way to the speech, Mr. Amanat received a cell phone call from Dr. Enid Gort, director of the Harlem Youth Development Foundation. “I need you for a radio interview. Do you mind delaying your schedule by 10 or 15 minutes?" she asked. The first plane hit the WTC sixteen minutes later.

Fortunately, all 60 Tradescape employees were able to leave their office safely by walking down a flight of stairs for over an hour, exiting the building two minutes before the first tower collapsed.

For Mr. Amanat, the attack was significant in another way. As one of approximately 6 million Muslims in the United States, he was determined to learn why fellow Muslims would commit such an act.

It was Dr. Gort who introduced him to the book Black Rage, a history of African-American violence and extremism and the way media images affect the self-esteem and identity of individuals in minority groups. Mr. Amanat also consulted Lee Hamilton, vice-chair of the 9/11 Commission, and Thomas Friedman, columnist for The New York Times and author of The World Is Flat.

These discussions and Mr. Amanat’s personal studies led him to an important decision: if negative media images helped contribute to 9/11, then positive media images could help bring the Muslim and Christian worlds together.

Today, as a financier for Blue Planet Films, LLC and other feature film companies, Mr. Amanat is seeking to inspire large-scale social change through the creation of socially-conscious movies that promote tolerance and understanding.

For more information about Mr. Amanat and his cinematic projects, please visit www.OmarAmanat.com.